Worst marketing is the marketing itself

If you are an entrepreneur or an employee, you have to do three things:

Building. Marketing. Selling.

It is a must.

As an entrepreneur, you build a product, or a system that can build a product. You try to make it automated. Then you try to put it in front of the eyes of the people. Then you try to manipulate them to buy your product. 

You hope to create a cycle. People will buy. They will give you feedback, or you directly collect data from them. You analyze the data, iterate and build a better product. Market it. Sell it. The cycle continues.

As an employee, you need to build. Whether you work as a secretary or a factory worker, you are building something together with numerous other builders in a constructed system called “company” encompassing people around the same vision. You also market. Maybe you are not directly marketing your product, but as an employee you always market yourself. The value you have in the market is in your hands, and if you sell yourself successfully, then your salary gets higher.

I sometimes think that any conscious action for marketing and selling is a manipulation, in a negative way. Your main responsibility is to build, and the rest follows. 

What do I mean by that?

There is a difference between:

1- making content on social media to provide value for the people just for the sake of providing value.

2- making content on social media to attract attention to have people in a funnel to direct them to buy a product (a physical product or a digital one like an e-book or an OF content)

The difference is in the mindset. The second one can be quite successful financially in the short run, but long term sustainability is limited. 

The second one does not provide an extra pillar for building a product. It directs people to the product. It is not the product, and that is why it is not authentic.

Your product should be a whole, with building and marketing. They are not separated, they are one.

If you push yourself to market, then your product is not good enough.

If you push yourself to sell, then your “marketing” (read it as “product” again) is not good enough.

A good product (yes, even if you are an entrepreneur or an employee, you are a product also, and you are THE PRODUCT) always sells. 

It markets for itself.

It sells for itself.

It creates production cycles for itself.